[Xavdidtheshadow]

> It was wrong when it was implemented, never documented, but has a currently defined behavior that most people don't want

That strikes me as exactly the sort of guarantee that's _not_ made by semver. You can rely on that behavior, but then you have to check against every patch version, because that's exactly the sort of thing that could change out from under you. Maintainers shouldn't worry about breaking this case- they never promised to support it in the first place.

I think a lot of those cases should be a major version change, and that's totally fine. We _should_ minimize the number of breaking changes to code people depend on, but sometimes the best fix to the (totally reasonable) situations you outlined above is to make a new major version. Users will have to make changes to upgrade (instead of just bumping the versions), but it won't change out from under them. Some docs about what's changing, why, and how to migrate your code go a long way here.

[lamontcg]

We do major version bumps on a yearly cycle and people get stuck on 8 year old versions and won't upgrade. Its easy to say that integers are free and limitless, but constant major version upgrades are something that people won't tolerate one way or another either.

And you have to understand that the people making these decisions make dozens of them for every single release, and when they make category mistakes that is how you get breaking changes released early. Every single bug when looked at in isolation looks obvious what should have happened given hindsight bias.

And I just don't think open source software, that isn't corporate backed in one way or another, should ever go 1.0 and it should stay 0.x.y and go ahead and break compat every 3-6 months or so as necessary. The cost of SemVer and trying to get it continuously correct on every single patch is a large tax.

[Xavdidtheshadow]

> We do major version bumps on a yearly cycle and people get stuck on 8 year old versions and won't upgrade

We do the same thing and have the exact same experience, unfortunately. Software is a messy business and it's hard to apply strict rules to human process.

I think ultimately SemVer can be used to to accurately communicate if you, a user, are safe to upgrade between versions if applied strictly. Whether or not your users will (or be happy about it) is another ballgame.